As I mentioned, Isabella was referred to a sleep center for an overnight sleep study.

The plan was this: Isabella and I would spend the night while a team of sleep specialists from around the world recorded every neural impulse from Isabella and fed them into a supercomputer which would crunch the data and spit out a cure, preferably in the form of a sugar-coated one-time-use pill. Or something like that.

Here’s how it went down.

Before we even left to go to the clinic, Carrie recommended that we bring Isabella’s DS, but I thought we wouldn’t need it. We’d just pop in, get wired up, then go to sleep. Right? Wrong. Carrie was right. The DS saved the day, er, night.

I’ll back up. On the night of the appointment, Carrie, Isabella, and I showed up at the sleep clinic . It’s a beautiful kid-friendly place (I suppose the “kid-friendly” part shouldn’t be a surprise since it was a pediatric clinic). After a frightening (for me) interchange with the receptionist about insurance issues and whether I’d be required to pay up front, we were ushered back into one of the sleep suites. The suite was similar to a small hotel room, with a single bed along the back wall, a futon nearby that pulled out into an amazingly uncomfortable second bed, and a small bathroom.

We’d prepared Isabella for the appointment, though I think we only succeeded in making her more nervous. I sometimes wonder if it’s better to spring things on her rather than to try to prepare her. The preparation just spreads out the dread. Anyway, a woman finally came into our suite after a very long wait with a handful of electrodes and wires. Isabella, focusing on her DS, gave a whimper of fear. The lady said, “I’m just setting up,” hung up the electrodes, then walked back out.

We sat and waited again, Isabella occasionally cutting her eyes up at the electrodes hanging on a hook. It was like a torturer had come into the room of an upcoming victim and laid a pair of bloody pliers on a table and then walked out, giving the victim ample time to stew and ponder whether that secret information was really all that important after all.

Finally, after another long wait (it was already over an hour after Isabella’s normal bedtime), a different woman came in and began to glue and strap things onto Isabella. Like I said above, the DS saved the night, as Isabella, though obviously terrified, kept playing with it with renewed vigor as though she were trying to block out the scene around her. The tech strapped electrodes to her legs and two elastic bands around her waist and upper chest. She then glued (or perhaps cemented) several electrodes to her scalp beneath her mass of curly hair. Finally, she strapped a contraption to her face that had parts that looked like a cut up white metal hanger, bent so it had pieces that went slightly into each nostril and over her top lip. The stiff wires didn’t really touch Isabella, but she wasn’t too keen on the strap that held the thing to her head and the wires that ran from it. Plus, I think her innate sense of style (inherited completely from Carrie) told her that this thing looked a bit kooky.

Speaking of wires, she was completely trapped, ensnared like a fly in a spider web. It was freaking me out; I don’t know how she handled it. Anybody with claustrophobia or certain tactile sensory issues would have a very hard time with a sleep study. Finally the tech was finished. Carrie had to leave to go pick up Madeline from gymnastics and take her home (we’d been at the clinic over two hours before Isabella was completely wired up), so it was just Isabella and I, and she was finally free to have a relaxing blissful night of sleep in a strange environment while lashed to the bed like Gulliver in Lilliput.

This is getting long, so I’ll finish it up tomorrow (I promise!). Or the next at the latest… Tune back in! It gets really exciting and dangerous! (CARRIE EDITORIAL COMMENT: err, no it doesn’t)